under advisement. and eventually render a decision. thank you very much. that is the last case on the calendar. the clerk will adjourn the court. >> court stands ad1 caurned. ..n booktv.

>> claudia rankin discusses her book, "citizen: an american lyric," a finalist for the national book award. >> hi, everyone welcome. i'm bridget mullins a professor here at usc in the master of professional writing program and i'm so thrilled to be here with claudia rankin today.an and i want to thank the l.a. times festival of books curators for asking me to be the moderator and the interviewer today because there are so many amazingly qualified people on this campus at the moment, and i'm just sitting in the catbird

seat. couple of announcements before we start. please silence your cell phones. and there's a book signing following this session. the book signing is located at signing area one and it's noted on the festival map in the center of the event program. and that personal recording is not allowed. so i as i just mentioned i am so delighted to be here with claudia rankin. just by way of introduction, how many of you have read "citizen"? oh, great. [laughter] this will be a conversation. okay. so as you know "citizen" just won the l.a. times poetry award. [applause] and it won the national book

circle critics award in poetry, and it was nominated for the award in criticism, which is a first, and i think it speaks to the cross-genre, hybrid nature of the book. her other titles are "don't let me be lonely" and "american lyric," got -- plot," she also writes plays and frequently collaborates with her husband, the filmmaker john lucas, on videos and she is also a chancellor at the academy of american poets. so this book "citizen," has captured america's attention and i mentioned to claudia that i wanted to start with a quote from theater director peter brook from his book "the empty space." he says, "i know of one acid test in the theater, it is literally an acid test." "when a performance is over, what remains?" "fun can be

forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears, and good arguments lose their thread." "when emotion and argument are harnessed with a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself, then something in the mind burns." "the event scorches onto the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell a picture." so that line that the acid test is when emotion and argument are harnessed with a bush from the audience -- a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself, and so with claudia's work i think that this important book has coincided with this desire for america to see more deeply into itself and she's accomplished this. and so we're just going to start with claudia reading from the book and get her voice in the book. >> well, thank you all for

coming out today, this morning. it's -- i'm full of gratitude, thank you. so i feel like i have one shot. [laughter] whoa, okay. i'll read this piece that was written because i was curious to know if in the white body there were moments where -- if inside the white body there were moments where whiteness knew that it was behaving because it was white. like there was -- so i asked a friend who i walk with because she owns one of these white bodies. [laughter] and i said can you tell me a time when you know that something that you're doing, you're doing because you are white? and she said, oh, you know in

l.a. not so much, but when i'm in new york, i know that when i enter public transportation and i see that empty seat next to a black body, i sit in it. there's a sort of scan that happens in me. and i said, well, you know, it's funny, because when you think about the black male body that's something i do myself. so then we had a really -- for me -- great discussion about the ways in which bodies try to, white or black or whatever color, try to step into a breach in the fabric of america into you know places that as ordinary, everyday citizens we know there's a problem. a deep a rooted problem. and we do what we can. and what we can means we take our body, and we put it somewhere. on the train the woman standing

makes you understand there are no seats available. and, in fact, there is one. is the woman getting off at the next stop? no. she would rather stand all the way to union station. the space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. you step quickly over the woman's fear, a fear she shares. you let her have it. the man digit acknowledge you as you -- doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. for him you imagine it is more like breath than wonder. he has had to think about it so much you wouldn't call it thought. when another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. he's gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.

you sit next to the man on the train, bus and the plane, waiting room anywhere. he could be forsaken. you put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside. you don't speak unless you are spoken to, and your body speaks to the space you fill, and you keep trying to fill it, except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you not to you. where he goes, the space follows him. if the man left his seat before union station, you would simply be a person in a seat on a train. you would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat; when where, why. the space won't lose its meaning. you imagine if the man spoke to you, he would say, "it's okay, i'm okay." "you don't need to sit here." you don't need to sit, and you sit and look past him into the

darkness the train is moving through, a tunnel. all the while the darkness allows you to look at him. does he feel you looking look at him? -- looking at him? you suspect so. what does suspicion mean? what does suspicion do? the soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. you're shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. you sit to repair whom, who? you erase that thought. and it might be too late for that. it might be too late or too early. the train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man, the window the tile tunnel, its slick darkness. occasionally a white light flickers by like a displaced sound. from across the aisle tracks, room harbor world the woman asks

the man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats. it's then the man next to you turns to you, and as if inside his own held, you agree that if anyone asks grow move you'll tell them we're traveling as a family. [applause] >> thank you. so one thing about hearing you read the work is to hear this voice which has -- it's your voice, but there's a dissolve in that there's such identification with the speaker of poem and then with the man in the subway. and so there's -- it's almost as

if identity dissolves into this identification. there's this -- i just realized now, there's this huge deal of empathy which happens. and i wanted to ask you this, and i think this might be a good time, is the use of the second person. which displaces us a little bit because we look at the book and we know that you wrote it. and you talked a little bit about your process in writing the book where you asked the group mind to come into the conversation. >> uh-huh. >> so i guess that choice of the second person versus i think somewhere in the book you call it the brahman i versus this you which is inclusive. >> uh-huh uh-huh.

>> it's very striking to start reading the book and to see all these micro-aggressions told in second perp. could you, could you talk about that choice? >> it wasn't a choice initially. i think i started working in the first or in the third person, and then i realized that the struggle of the text was how do you get a reader not to think they already know? because i think these are old problems. they're ancient. and they have stayed with us you know, now we can say centuries, right? and so how do we reenter in a way that allows us to have to interrogate again? and the second person lawed that

because -- allowed that because it meant that the reader had to say this person is doing that and that person is doing that. and i perhaps see myself standing here. and so those people who said they didn't see race, i don't see race, you're a little obsessed by race because i only see human beings. you know began to say things like, well that person must be the black person, or that body must be the brown body or that's probably a white guy. and then suddenly race enters the space, and then one has to take a position around whether or not one is capable of holding the actions of one of those people. so that, that was the sort of the thinking behind the second perp.

but -- person. but another part of me loved this idea if you're talking about sort of minorities, that you're actually talking about the second person. that the position of the other is the second person. so on a sort of language level, there was that kind of sort of deliciousness around the way that second person met the use of the word "other." >> there's also a multiplicity of voices in the book a generosity. james baldwin, so many voices in the book and ralph ellison. and i thought of the last line of "invisible man" which is "who knows, but on some level i speak for you." so that idea of the role of the citizen or the responsibility of the citizen is to notice things and to speak about them. and that's that's a role that

you've been put in since the publication of the book. i don't know how many printings it's had now -- >> i think six. >> six? >> it might be up to six. >> phenomenal. and there's been a change orphan one of the page -- on one of the pages. i don't know how many of you have recent editions but in the edition i have, which is the first edition on 133 i think it is -- no it's -- yeah. it's 134 and 135. and as you know since most of you have read the book, the book moves from micro-aggression from from the second person anecdotes that are really powerful, each and every one, and moves by accretion. and we have a gorgeous lyric essay about serena williams and it moves forward and then we have these macro- aggressions that are sometimes they almost seem like unutter bl.

so there's just, it's like a breckian signage. break had written around the theater walls, don't stare so romantically. it's almost like that's the architecture of the book as well. so in the recent editions of the book, there are more in memories. there's not just jordan russell davis can, there's not just -- there's now eric garner, john youford, the list goes on -- >> walter scott is outside the lust but inside the list yeah. >> and so there's something of a first responder energy to the book that's kind of, i think, sending waves through america. but also on that facing page, can you talk about what you've done in recent printings of the book? >> well i -- after the killing of michael brown i was thinking

about darren wilson and you might remember he said it was as if a demon was coming, and i saw, i saw him and i saw hulk hogan. and so i began to think um, what's going on inside that head of his, you know? and i don't mean it -- i think it's important. and so i really was just thinking about those statements. and so i wrote down -- because white men can't police their imagination, black men are dying. and i thought it was the first line to something that i would continue to think about this and think about darren wilson's statements. but then everything else i wrote seemed to fall back into because

white men can police their imagination, black men are dying. and then do you remember the other policemen asked the black guy to get his license and the guy reaches in the car to get his license and the man shoots him? and then you have the audio recording, and the black guy says to him, why did you shoot me? and he said because you reached into your car. and he said, but you asked me to get my license. and in the voice of the white policeman, you also hear a kind of confoundedness. like he too is like i don't know why this happened. and you can hear it. you can hear it. and so -- which is, i think, a very different kind of body than

white policeman who shot walter lamar. i mean, we could see that when he picked up the taser and dropped it by lamar's body. i'm not saying that there is one body one white body in terms of this kind of interrogation. but that um, that led me to want to think about what is happening inside the white imagination relative to the black and brown body. but that moment itself is itself. and so i ended up just moving it into a very loose haiku. and putting that replacing that in the later edition of the book. >> it's, it's a very strong haiku moment. it does -- it takes, it takes you, it takes you actually deeper into the book i think. and so, but you also you took out the justice system right?

is that right? >> i did take out the justice system. initially the page read in memory of jordan russell davis on one side, and then on the other side it said, it had the date of the justice system. that case, if you remember, that was the case where the white guy -- let's call him that, the white guy -- saw russell in the car playing music with his friends, and he shot him. so he shot into -- and he claimed that he was afraid, and that's why he killed him. but, and initially he got off. but then the case somehow -- i don't remember exactly how it went, but now he's in jail. so it seemed like the justice system had actually shown up on that one. so it didn't seem correct to

leave it there for that. so that led to the desire to change it, to be more accurate, you know? i think when you are as you say, being a first responder, you want to kind of first respond with as much information as you have. and since we had more information, i thought well, we can change it. >> the book folds in a lot of techniques that maybe weren't available to poets from a hundred years ago or even twenty years ago. there's a capaciousness and a conversation that seems to be happening, and you know the book. most of you have read it and it's got a beautiful heft to it. but it's also, it contains illustrations that aren't illustrations. it's not a factic poetry.

it requires interaction almost in the way that a play script requires interaction. and part of me wondered because i've taught this book three times now, and every time i've taught it i've been amazed at the subtlety, but also the appropriateness of the placement and the resonance of some of the images. and i wondered if you could talk about that process of finding the images or having the images folded into the text but not as an illustration as a scene. >> uh-huh. >> it's almost like a scenic it's an aperture into another conversation, a parallel conversation. >> uh-huh. >> very powerful images throughout. and then at the end you have

these scripts of situation videos which you can watch online, and they're also very powerful with the techniques of slowing down the action and the voiceover coinsiding. but -- coinciding. so there's a lot of visual, theatrical energy in the book. and so i wondered if you could talk about the um imagines and is this -- images and is this different from your other work? does it expand on a process that you had had before? or is it, is it a natural progression for this project? >> well, i really i love bridget for saying i'm a visionary, but actually i think blake also had poems and imagings. and in his case maybe a little bit more illustrative, i think. so there has been a kind of line

coming down can. what's different i think about "citizen" and the use of images here has to do with the visual arts community. i had to get permission to use many of them. all of them, i had to get permission to use. and because of that i feel that it opens out the space of the page so that it really is a conversation between the many minds that supplied the stories in this, in this text and the sort of amazing creative minds that created the visual pieces. so i loved that the inclusion of the images meant an opening out of a conversation. and a consideration that one

couldn't -- a conversation that one couldn't control. that also was exciting to me, because i have absolutely no idea what bridget took from the images that she saw. i mean, i know why i used them but that doesn't account for what will happen when somebody else interacts with the text and the image. so to -- it makes it, the space, much more alive for me. and that was exciting. the, you know the sense that one cannot and does not want to control the reader. let it take them where it takes them. in terms of how it's different from the other work i think that in "citizen" for me the stakes are a little higher. i was, i was very concerned with

having the images enter the work authentically, so i was interested in what generated the work itself. so, for instance, nick cave i used a piece of his work. i don't know if you -- this is the nick cave piece. he does these pieces that they're actual garments, incredible -- exquisitely made. and he calls them sound suits. and i was really interested in why he made them. and it took me a long time to track down interviews, and there wasn't a lot of writing around it. but finally i found an interview where he said that after the beating of rodney king he thought, well, if it's only just

about the color of people's skin, why don't we create garments that will coffer that up? -- that will cover that up, and we can start again? we'll just start over. and so he made these sound suits, and they literally cover you from head to foot. and that was supposed to sort of clear the space. why is that interesting to me? there's a fantastic theorist called robin clly. he wrote -- kelley. he wrote a book called "freedom dreams." the last chapter of the book talks about the way that the only way out of this kind of systemic racism that is equal to what it means to be american is to make some kind of surreal jump. but we can't seem to work it out inside. so we're going to have to jump.

and it seemed like nick cave had jumped. so i was really interested in the sort of back story behind the pieces, on the pieces taken at the million man march, or one of them was he used a text the text from sor rah neil thurston, i feel the most -- [inaudible] when i'm thrown against a background. so there was a real historical conversation going on in the use of the different pieces. >> i think that's more of what i meant, is that there's there's a dependence or interdependence or ability to engage with technology and with documentation and with collective memory and collective questions in a way that wasn't available, i think, before the internet. >> yeah. >> and so the book becomes a really large conversation that people are having all over

country. so one question i also had about the use of images and the way that a lot of the book sends you looking, it sends you like zora neil hur stomp says research is formalized curiosity. we have a curiosity you whet our appetite. i'm curious about the choice. i mean, in some ways it seems perfect as does the closing text, a prose poem. i can hear the even breathing. maybe you would read that for us and then talk a little bit about the choice of the turner painting at the end of the book? because i, i think the book it's it must have been really challenging to end this book -- [laughter] to come to some sort of -- or there's no finality for it because it seems you're folding back into it.

it is like a theatrical production. there's more going on. but for now, for this entity this is the end. so maybe you could read this last page and talk about the painting. >> okay. no it's true. it was impossible to end this book. my friend karen green, is in the back and she knows. i was talking constantly like how do you get out of here? [laughter] but, you know, i had another friend who kept saying, oh, just write some more of those micro-aggressions, and i'm like i'm not just going to keep writing those. so i literally would be thinking and thinking, like, how do you end this? because you don't want to suggest artificially that there is an ending, that there is any way in which one can reconcile these things happening

day-to-day for these bodies. i can hear the even breathing that creates passages to dreams. and, yes i want to interrupt to tell him/her/us/you/me i don't know how to end what doesn't have an ending. tell me a story he says wrapping his arms around me. yesterday i began. i was waiting in the car for time to pass. a woman pulled in and started to park her car facing mine. our eyes met, and what passed passed as quickly as the look away. she backed up and parked on the other side of the lot. i could have followed her to worry my question, but i had to go. i was expected on court.

i grabbed my racquet. the sunrise is slow and cloudy dragging the light in but barely. did you win, he asked? it wasn't a match, i say. it was a lesson. and that was one of those things, those moments where i wrote down exactly what happened. i was -- i went to have my tennis lesson, and i was sitting in the car eating a banana and thinking, how do i end the end of the book? [laughter] and this woman drove up, and she looked at me, and then she backed up. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. and i thought -- this is kind of silly, but i jumped out of the car and i said, i know i'm going to ask her why she did

that. [laughter] and i started walking towards her car which probably freaked her out even more -- [laughter] like oh, my god the big black lady's coming after me. [laughter] but then i thought, oh, my god i'm going to be late. ross who i take lessons from, would have not been happy. so i just thought, oh, i can't do both things. and then what is she really going to say to me? you're right i am a racist. [laughter] i'm really sorry. and the book ends with this image by turner. i think isn't turner at the getty right now? >> yes. >> yeah. i need to get over there. i love turner i've always loved turner. i've always felt there's a thing, you can be a constable perp, and you can be a turner person. and i've always been a turner person because turner's so moody, and everything's so cloudy, you know?

so i was thinking about this image as the final image because it seemed to me it embodied what it meant to move through a landscape or a sea scape in this case where you think you see what you see and, in fact, it looks nice. i mean, there's something very beautiful about this image if you just glance at it. so it holds a kind of normalcy. and even beauty. but then when you are pulled in to examine what is actually happening, you see that in this case the slaves have been thrown overboard which was a practice that was engaged for two reasons.

one, if you had sick and dying slaves on a slave slip -- slave ship and you arrived, nobody would buy them, obviously. so it would just be property that was that -- literally. but if you toss them overboard, then you could say the insurance would have to pay for them. that would be lost property. so there was that practice of just tossing anybody who was failing in any way overboard. and in this case there was a storm coming he felt he was going to -- people were ill on the boat and he, so he dumped all of the black bodies. when he arrived the owner of the property -- the black bodies -- was like, what

happened to my property? hey. and the other shipmates said it was his decision to throw them out. so he was put on trial for that. but turner actually was upset that they were killing the black bodies. and so you gotta like him, you know? [laughter] to move it out of the realm of commodity and into the human realm where it started and should stay. so that was -- and you can when i went to purchase the image you can purchase it with the detail, and it seemed to enact this idea of what happens when you start to be conscious, what happens when you look? what happens when you interrogate actually what's going on? there it is. and because all of this shit is

happening because of visual triggers right? it's just, oh, she's got brown skip oh, she's got -- she's a black. it's a visual. i wanted to end in a visual moment. and that's why the visuals are important to this book because it is at the source of the bias and the racism. >> i thought i was a close reader, but i'm beginning to think i'm not because -- [laughter] is this last piece the only time that you write in first person? >> it is. >> okay. >> that inside the macro-aggressions. it was a moment of owning that i in the final -- because i wanted the end to do a different thing. and so in that sense i thought in this moment i'm going to own the i in terms of my own -- you

know, toni morrison talks a lot about not being interested in the white gaze and many of her books, in fact have very few white people in there. but, you know, i -- as much as i, i'm a lover of tony morrison -- tony morrison there's no way that this work is possible without morrison's work and also her critical work "playing in the dark." i think that it's a false construction to act as if i am not interacting with white bodies all the time including my husband's. so, you know, that would be problematic. [laughter] so i -- but one can own the i and one does own the i relative to one's self.

so i did want to do a kind of corrective around that. >> that's fascinating, and i read that -- i read an interview with lauren berlance and with her work on trauma a, and while i think the subject of the book is race, the subtext is trauma in that traumatic reexperiencing of these beliefs or these deeply unconsciously-held behaviors that aren acted on a -- are enacted on a daily basis. and early in the book i think it's the last section of the first micro-aggressions the character is going to visit a trauma counselor, a therapist. the image facing it is the really striking image of the

hybrid girl/deer and the animal, the self as animal. and i wondered if you could talk about your study of trauma or your relationship with trauma? i was also thinking about your book that -- i think it's "plot" that has a lot of virginia woolf written through and her writings on ptsd and just how you -- i think it's a new thing, a rare thing to bring trauma and racism together in this way. and it is, it is -- it must be an ongoing trauma. so if you could talk about that a little bit. >> that's, that's a great question and yeah as you're speaking, my mind is like --

the, i -- you see? [laughter] there it is. well, i've always been entered in trauma. i don't know how many people have watched that film by claude lensman, shoa? it's an eight-hour documentary in which lensman has gatt ored people together -- gathered people together who are more or less the last survivors of the camps. and many of them are, you know getting on in age. and he wants them to tell him exactly what has happened to them. and they have moved on in the sense that they've grown up kids and moved to israel in the case of one guy, a barber. and somehow that information was locked down.

and lensman's mission was to get them to retell exactly what happened to them. and he made a decision in that documentary not to use any historical footage. so he was relying on those people to bring forward everything, the history the emotional space, the pragmatic details of those moments. and so the documently is really about -- documentary is really about watching lensman on a certain level getting people to enter the side of trauma and to hold that place. and he would he would ask them questions, and they would be happy to speak to a certain point, and then they would stop.

and he would say, no, you have of to -- what happened next? like, so the nazis said dig up that area, and you went to dig up the area and then what happened? and the person would just be like, that's it i'm done. thank you. i've told you everything i need to tell you good-bye. and lensman was like no, no, no no. what happened next? what happened? and the body would break down. it would literally break down. they would start crying, they would not be able to go on. and you would wait, you would wait with them. until they would say something like as i started to shovel in the dirt, i saw the body of my wife. you know? it was one of those -- even i'm b remembering him say it, and it breaks my heart still. and so i was really interested in how narrative, how the actual

storytelling is tied to the holding of the grief and the trauma. and so i wanted in a way to collect these stories my own and the stories of my friends, because these moments even though they're small in the sections that contain the micro-aggressions, they're also heartbreaking. because they often happen between you and a friend. you and a colleague. you and a moment in the day that is not supposed to be spectacular. that's supposed to be ordinary, that's supposed to allow you to pass through. and then it just it gets all gummed up. and you spend all of your time trying to get past it so you can

do the next thing. i mean, i began to think of white privilege actually, as mobility. as the ability to just move through life without -- with the normal stresses that are human stresses without this added thing. that has to be negotiated by brown and black bodies every day. and it is every day in some way. so that's how i was thinking about trauma um in relationship to this text. there's also john henry a friend told me this phrase, john henry is the idea that black bodies have to work hard just to

get through the through their lives. and so the stresses that get built up around that become actual physical things like high blood pressure, for example. and so -- and within the medical community, this is recognized as a sip dream. it's an actual syndrome. in fact somebody from the harvard school of health called me up and said he was going to use this book in his classes now. in order to talk about that, and also the psychiatric convention next year -- whatever that is -- [laughter] called me and asked me if i would come and talk. so that sense of the accession and what that accretion of bias does to the body is something

that the text in an underground way is interested in. and it's something that lauren bellant, the critic in cruel optimism writes about. she's very interested in the ways in which the body acts out relative to its own frustrations and trauma. >> thank you. i was so curious about that and the structure of the book as well because it seems like it goes along, and something's forgotten, and then there's a trigger, and there's a memory. and in the book different characters or different voices advise the noticing voice to stop noticing. >> uh-huh. >> just stop, don't pay attention. you know get along, along. don't register it. but there's this insistence -- i don't know if it's an insistence, but it's a registering of it over and over.

and two of the figures who are deeply registered, one is serena williams through the lyric essay and the visuals, and the other is the situation video. and i bond ored if you could talk -- wondered if you could talk a little bit about why you chose sports figures. what is it about these athletes? >> well, it's not so much the sports figures themself, it's the, it's sports. the fact that those things are documented and replayed. so if the difficulty is, wait did she just say that? ah. and then you say, did you just say that? and they're like what, i didn't say anything. oh, i thought i heard you say something, but okay. whereas in sports you can replay it. you know that's the thing about sports something happens and they're like wait and then they replay it.

and so it's easy to document and look at and address the questions of these moments of aggression that happens within a space using sports figures. so in the world cup, that was -- do you guys remember? that was the world cup, and maserati, the italian player says something to -- [inaudible] and nobody knows what was said. but zadan walks by him, decides not to let it go -- whatever it was -- turns around, comes back and head butts him. and then they're all so dramatic in soccer, right? maserati falls down like, oh, my

god, you know? but he was able to get up a second later. so clearly -- [laughter] so it was almost like ballet. it was beautifully enacted. but in the space of the time between that action and the public finding out what was said, everything erupted in terms of race. everybody -- the newspaper, the chat lines everything was like oh, he called him a dirty arab. he called him a nigger, he called him this, he called him that. and they brought in lip readers -- [laughter] and the lip readers said yeah that's what he said he said he was a dirty arab. he said, you know, that's what they saw the lips saying. and to me, that was pass a nateing. it's like, you know everybody knows that racism is right under

the surface of these interactions. and so the minute there is discomfort and confrontation, the language of racism comes in. it turns out that what he said was "your sister is a whore." and that, that is also fascinating because in writing about european racism it's been said the way the european will get at the algerian is by insulting the women in their families. so in a sense, he did enact a moment of racism in exactly the way it had been documented it would occur back in the 1940s when he wrote "black skip, white mask." -- "black skin white mask." so that's sort of my interest in

sports. i'm also now interested in sports because i became interested in sports, you know how those things happen? in watching serena williams, i became a huge tennis fan. i began playing tennis and i love playing tennis. i'm now a huge fan of rafael nadal, if anybody afterwards wants to talk about whether he thinks he's going to be able to win the french open again this year i'm yours. [laughter] >> and it also brings you and the reader into a larger conversation because there's so much interest around sports. >> uh-huh exactly. it's a national treasure. [laughter] >> as is we're approaching the end here so i will just say as is your book, claudia. it's a, it's a book that i think hearing you read from is such a privilege, the tone and the work that went into it, which we didn't even touch on, the process. there's so much to talk about

here, as you know. so thank you for being attentive, and let's give a warm thank you to claudia. [applause] >> thank you. thank you bridget. [applause] >> this is booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's our prime time lineup. ann dun woody rememberses her military career tonight starting at 7 eastern on booktv. and then at 8 david ritz discusses his career as a ghost writer and his work. at 8:45 it's a profile of andrew marshall, former head of the pentagon's internal think tank, the office of net assessment. at 10 p.m. eastern on "after

words," jon cra cower has a specific focus on missoula, montana. and we wrap up our prime time lineup with masha gasen who discuss her recent book on the boston marathon bombing. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> and meanwhile the republicans seem like they just keep on they keep wanting to run as democrats lite which is not going to be effective here. if you want real democrat you vote for real democrats in the state of california. the establishment republican party, basically there's two theories of how to you win elections. there's the theory that ronald reagan pursued which was i'm going to convince people they're on my side and then there's the theory that i'm going to convince people that i'm on their side and one tends to be successful, and the one that republicans are pursuing